[bowietrousers]

In 1995, all we had at university had was a bunch of SunOS & HP-UX workstations. Yes, they had X, mwm and (later) CDE, but you just had to learn the command line to do anything particularly useful. Man pages, a few of the IT service's leaflets (How to use troff/LaTeX), searching the web (Altavista! Dogpile! Webcrawler!) and asking in Usenet groups when I hit a real roadblock. I started building small shell scripts out of need to automate some things, and learned about the shell environment and the overall Unix philosophy doing that.

This was over a period of years rather than weeks or months - I probably can't say that I was proficient on the CLI until around 1999 when I really started getting stuck into Linux and building everything from scratch. I find that young developers today expect to learn everything immediately, expecting a one-true-way to wisdom, rather than accepting that true mastery seeps in over time, largely through doing and getting things wrong. So, experiment, and don't give up when you can't figure out something immediately.